Sophie's Choice (Open Road)

by William Styron

  I ordered a beer from the slovenly Irish waiter and waited for Sophie to return. The Maple Court regulars, the off-duty cops and elevator operators and building supers and random barflies, had begun to filter in, exuding a faint mist of steam from the summer downpour which had lasted hours. Thunder still grumbled over the far Brooklyn ramparts, but the rain’s fragile pattering now, like the intermittent sound of a single tap dancer, told me that most of the deluge had ceased. I listened with one ear to talk of the Dodgers, a preoccupation which that summer verged near lunacy. I swilled at the beer with a sudden raging desire to get plastered. Part of this sprang from all of Sophie’s Auschwitz images, which left an actual stink in my nostrils as of the rotted cerements and dank crumbling bonepiles I once beheld amid the brambles of New York’s potter’s field—an island-secluded place I had become acquainted with in the recent past, a domain, like Auschwitz, of burning dead flesh, and like it, the habitat of prisoners. I had been stationed on the island briefly at the end of my military career. I actually smelled that charnel-house odor again, and to banish it I gulped beer. But another part of my funk had to do with Sophie, and I gazed at the ladies’-room door in a sudden prickle of anxiety—what if she had ducked out on me? what if she had disappeared?—unable to figure out how to cope either with the new crisis she had injected into my life or with that craze for her which was like some stupid pathological hunger and which had all but paralyzed my will. My Presbyterian rearing had surely not anticipated such a derangement.

  For the terrible thing was that now, just as I had rediscovered her—just as her presence had begun to spill over me like a blessing—she appeared once more to be on the verge of vanishing from my life. That very morning, when I ran into her at the Pink Palace, one of the first things she told me was that she was still leaving. She had come back only to pack up some things she had left. Dr. Blackstock, ever solicitous, concerned about her breakup with Nathan, had found her a tiny but adequate apartment much nearer his office in downtown Brooklyn and she was moving there. My heart had plummeted. It was wordlessly evident that although Nathan had abandoned her for good, she was still mad for him; the vaguest allusion to him on my part caused her eyes to shadow over in grief. Even putting this aside, I utterly lacked the courage to express my longing for her; without appearing foolish, I could not follow her to her new dwelling miles away—could not anyway, even if I had the means to do so. I felt crippled, hamstrung by the situation, but she was obviously on her way out of the orbit of my own existence with its absurdly unrequited love. There was something so ominous in this realization of my approaching loss that I began to feel a dull nausea. Also a leaden, reasonless anxiety. That is why, when Sophie failed to return from the rest room after what seemed an interminable time (it could only have been a few minutes), I rose with the intention of invading those intimate precincts in search of her—ah!—when she reappeared. To my delight and surprise she was smiling. Even today I so often remember Sophie glimpsed across Maple Court vistas. Anyway, whether by accident or celestial design a shaft of dusty sunlight, bursting through the last clouds of the departing storm outside, caught her head and hair for an instant and surrounded it with an immaculate quattrocento halo. Given my unabashed hots for her, I hardly needed her to appear angelic, but she did. Then the halo evaporated, she strode toward me with the silk of her skirt flowing in innocent, voluptuous play against her ripely outlined crotch, and I heard some slave or donkey down in the salt mines of my spirit give a faint heartsick moan. How long, Stingo, how long, old brother-self?

  “I’m sorry I took so long, Stingo,” she said as she sat down beside me. After the chronicle of the afternoon it was hard to believe she was so cheerful. “In the bathroom I met an old Russian bohémienne—a, you know, diseuse de bonne aventure.”

  “What?” I said. “Oh, you mean a fortuneteller.” I had seen the old hag in the bar several times before, one of Brooklyn’s myriad Gypsy hustlers.

  “Yes, she read my palm,” she said brightly. “She spoke to me in Russian. And do you know what? She said this. She said, ‘You have had recent bad fortune. It concerns a man. An unhappy love. But do not fear. Everything will turn out well.’ Isn’t that wonderful, Stingo? Isn’t that just great?”

  It was my feeling then, as it is now, and forgive the sexism, that the most rational-seeming females are pushovers for such harmlessly occult frissons, but I let it slide and said nothing; the augury seemed to give Sophie great joy and I could not help but start to share her sunny mood. (But what could it mean? I worried. Nathan was gone.) However, the Maple Court began to vibrate with unhealthy shadows, I yearned for the sun, and when I suggested that we take a stroll in the late-afternoon air she quickly agreed.

  The storm had washed Flatbush sparkling clean. Lightning had struck somewhere nearby; there was a smell in the street of ozone, eclipsing even the fragrance of sauerkraut and bagels. My eyelids felt gritty. I blinked painfully in the blinding glare; after Sophie’s dark memories and the Maple Court’s crepuscular murk, the bourgeois blocks rimming Prospect Park seemed dazzling, ethereal, almost Mediterranean, like a flat leafy Athens. We walked to the corner of the Parade Grounds and watched the kids playing baseball in the sandlots. Overhead the droning airplane with its trailing banner, ubiquitous that Brooklyn summer against cloud-streaked ultramarine, advertised more nightly thrills at the hippodrome of Aqueduct. For a long while we squatted in a patch of weedy, rain-damp, rank-smelling grass while I explained to Sophie the mechanics of baseball; she was a serious student, sweetly engaged, her eyes attentive. I found myself so caught up in my own didactic spell that at last all the doubts and wonderments about Sophie’s past that had lingered there since her recent long recital scattered from my mind, even the most dreadful and mysterious uncertainty: what had finally happened to her little boy?

  The question came back to trouble me as we walked the short block to Yetta’s house. I wondered if the story of Jan was something she could ever reveal. But this perplexity soon went away. I was dogged by another concern: I had begun to fret powerfully inside over Sophie herself. And the pain intensified when she mentioned again that she would be leaving tonight for her new apartment. Tonight! It was all too clear that “tonight” meant right now.

  “I’m going to miss you, Sophie,” I blurted as we clumped up the Pink Palace’s front steps. I was conscious of the loutish vibrato in my voice, pitched just this side of desperation. “I’m really going to miss you!”

  “Oh, we’ll be seeing each other, don’t worry, Stingo. We really will! After all, I’m not going too far away. I’m still going to be in Broooklyn.” The shading of her words brought some reassurance, but of a fragile and anemic sort; it bespoke loyalty and a kind of lovingness and a desire—even a resolute desire—to maintain old ties. But it fell short of that emotion that brings cries and whispers. Affection for me she had—of that I was sure—but passion, no. About which I could say that I had harbored hope but no wild illusions.

  “We’ll have dinner together a lot,” she said while I trailed her upstairs to the second floor. “Don’t forget, Stingo, I’m going to miss you too. After all, you’re about the best friend I have, you and Dr. Blackstock.” We went into her room. It looked already close to being vacated. I was struck by the fact that the radio-phonograph was still there; somehow I recalled from Morris Fink that Nathan had intended to come back and carry it away with him, but he obviously had not. Sophie turned the radio on and from WQXR the sound of the overture to Russlan and Ludmilla blared forth. It was the sort of romantic fustian we both barely tolerated, but she let it play; the hoofbeats of the Tartar kettledrums began thudding through the room. “I’ll write down my address for you,” she said, fumbling through her pocketbook. It was an expensive bag—Moroccan, I believe—made of handsome tooled leather, an item that caught my eye only because I remembered the day a few weeks before when Nathan, with extravagant loving pride, had given it to her. “You’ll come to see me often and we’ll go out to dinner. There are a lot
of restaurants there that are good but cheap. Funny, where’s that slip of paper with the address on it? I don’t even remember the number myself yet. Someplace on a street called Cumberland, it is supposed to be close to Fort Greene Park. We can still take walks together, Stingo.”

  “Oh, but I’m going to be very lonesome, Sophie,” I said.

  She looked up from the radio and cocked her eye at me in an expression which I suppose might have been regarded as impish, plainly oblivious of my undisguised Sophiemania, and now uttering words which made up the last type of half-assed sentiment I wanted to hear. “You’ll find some beautiful girl, Stingo, very soon—I’m sure of that. Someone very sexy. Someone like that good-looking Leslie Lapidus, only less of the coquette, more complaisante—”

  “Oh God, Sophie,” I groaned, “deliver me from the Leslies of the world.”

  Then suddenly something about the entire situation—Sophie’s imminent departure, but also the handbag and the near-empty room with its associations of Nathan and the days of the recent past, the music and the high hilarity and all the glorious times we had had together—filled me with such ruinously enervating gloom that I let out another groan, loud enough that I saw a startled light like a flash of beads come to Sophie’s eyes. And quite violently disturbed now, I found myself gripping her firmly by the arms.

  “Nathan!” I cried. “Nathan! Nathan! What in God’s name has happened? What has happened, Sophie? Tell me!” I was close to her, nose to nose, and I was aware of one or two flecks of my spittle landing on her cheek. “Here is this incredible guy who’s madly in love with you, the Prince Charming of all time, a man who adores you—I’ve seen it on his face, Sophie, like a form of worship—and all of a sudden you’re out of his life. What in God’s name happened to him, Sophie? He puts you out of his life! You can’t tell me it’s just because of some simple-minded suspicion that you’ve been unfaithful to him, like he said the other night at the Maple Court. It’s got to have some deeper meaning, some deeper cause than that. Or what about me? Me? Me!” I began to smite my chest to emphasize my own involvement in the tragedy. “What about the way he treated me, this guy? I mean, Sophie, Jesus Christ, I don’t have to explain to you, do I, that Nathan came to be like a brother to me, a fucking brother. I never knew anyone like him in all my life, anyone more intelligent, more generous, more funny and fun to be with, more—oh Jesus, simply no one as great. I have loved that guy! I mean, practically single-handed it was Nathan who when he read my first stuff gave me the faith to go on and be a writer. I felt he did it out of love. And then out of nowhere—out of the fucking blue, Sophie—he turns on me like a snarling dog with rabies. Turns on me, tells me my writing is shit, treats me as if I were the most contemptible asshole he had ever known. And then cuts me out of his life as firmly and finally as he cut you.” My voice had risen its usual uncontrolled octaves, becoming an epicene mezzo-soprano. “I can’t stand this, Sophie! What are we going to do?”

  The tears pouring down Sophie’s face in watery bright freshets told me that I should not have unloaded myself in this way. I should have had more control. I now saw that I could not have caused her worse pain had she possessed a hot inflamed cicatrix from which I had savagely yanked the stitches in a horrible ball of fresh sutures and outraged flesh. But I could not help myself; indeed, I felt her grief meet mine in some huge gushing confluence and flow onward with it even as I continued to rage. “He can’t take people’s love for him and piss on it like that. It’s unfair! It’s... it’s...” I began to stammer. “It’s, by God, fucking inhuman!”

  She turned away from me then, sobbing. There was something a little somnambulistic about the way in which she walked with arms rigid at her side across the room to the edge of the bed. Then abruptly she flopped face down on the apricot bedspread and smothered her face in her hands. She was silent but her shoulders were heaving. I went to the side of the bed and stood above her, looking down. I began to master my voice. “Sophie,” I said, “forgive me for all this. But I just don’t understand anything. I don’t understand anything about Nathan, and maybe I don’t understand anything about you, either. Though I think I’m able to figure out a lot more about you than I ever will about him.” I paused. It was, I knew, like creating another wound to mention that matter which she herself had obviously felt was so hateful to talk about—and hadn’t she with her own lips warned me away from it?—but I was compelled to say what I had to say. I reached down and laid my hand lightly on her bare arm. The skin was very warm and seemed to throb beneath my fingers like the throat of a frightened bird. “Sophie, the other night... the other night at the Maple Court when he... when he cast us out. That awful night. Surely he knew you had a son in that place—just a while ago you told me that you let him know that. Then how could he have been so cruel to you, taunting you like that, asking you how you lived through it all while so many of the others were”—the word nearly choked me, a clot in my throat, but I managed to get it out—“were gassed. How could anybody do that to you? How could anyone love you and be so unbelievably cruel?”

  She said nothing for a while, merely lay there with her face buried in her hands. I sat on the edge of the bed beside her and stroked the pleasantly warm, almost febrile surface of her arm, delicately skirting the vaccination scar. From that angle I could plainly see the grim blue-black tattoo, the row of numbers remarkably neat, a little barbwire fence of orderly ciphers in which one “seven” was bisected with the meticulous European slash. I smelled that herbal perfume she so often wore. Could it be possible, Stingo, I asked myself, that she would ever love you? I suddenly wondered if I dared now make a pass at her. No, definitely not. Lying there, she seemed terribly vulnerable, but my outburst had tired me, leaving me somehow shaken and empty of desire. Moving my fingers upward, I touched the loose strands of her butter-bright hair. Finally I sensed that she had stopped weeping. Then I heard her say, “It was never his fault. He always had this demon, this demon which appeared when he was in his tempêtes. It was the demon in control, Stingo.”

  I do not know which image at this moment, each appearing almost simultaneously at the rim of my consciousness, gave me the chill that traversed the length of my spinal column: that of black monstrous Caliban or of Morris Fink’s fearful golem. But I felt myself shiver, and in the midst of the spasm said, “What do you mean, Sophie—a demon?”

  She made no immediate reply. Instead, after a long silence, she raised her head up and said something in a soft matter-of-fact voice that truly flabbergasted me, it was so totally out of character, so much a part of some other Sophie I had not witnessed until this very day.

  “Stingo,” she said, “I can’t leave here so quickly. Too many memories. Do me a big favor. Please. Go over to Church Avenue and buy a bottle of whiskey. I want very much to get drunk.”

  I got her the whiskey—a fifth of rye—which helped enable her to tell me about some bad moments during the turbulent year she spent with Nathan, before I came on the scene. All of which might be considered unnecessary to recount were it not for the fact that he would return to possess our lives again.

  In Connecticut, somewhere on the beautiful winding arboreal highway that stretches north and south along the riverbank between New Milford and Canaan, there had been an old country inn with slanted oak floors, a sunny white bedroom with samplers on the wall, two damp panting Irish setters downstairs and the smell of applewood burning in the fireplace—and it was there, Sophie told me that night, that Nathan tried to take her life and then end his own in what has come to be known in the vernacular as a suicide pact. This happened in the fall of the year when the leaves were fiercely incandescent, a few months after their first meeting in the Brooklyn College library. Sophie said she would have remembered the terrible episode for many reasons (for example, it was simply the first time he had really even raised his voice at her since they met) but she would never be able to obliterate the chief reason: his raging insistence (again for the first time since they had been together) that
she justify to his satisfaction the way in which she survived Auschwitz while “the others” (as he put it) perished.

  When Sophie described this browbeating and then told the wretched tale of the ensuing events, I was of course immediately reminded of Nathan’s wild behavior on that recent night in the Maple Court when he bade both of us his adamantly final, unfond farewell. I was about to point out to Sophie the similarity and question her about it, but by this time—devouring a huge steaming mound of spaghetti in a little Italian restaurant she and Nathan used to frequent on Coney Island Avenue—she had become so totally absorbed in her chronicle of their life together that I hesitated, faltered helplessly, then lumpishly kept silent. I considered the whiskey. It was baffling about Sophie and her whiskey—baffling and a little overpowering. For one thing, she had the capacity of a Polish hussar; it was astounding to see this poised, lovely and usually painfully correct creature put away the booze; fully a quarter of the fifth of Seagram’s I had bought her had vanished by the time we took a taxi to the restaurant. (She also insisted on transporting the bottle, upon which, it is important to add, I committed no incursions, sticking, as always, to beer.) I attributed this new indulgence to grief over Nathan’s abandonment.